Category: News

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article entitled: “Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match”. This article documents how some fake news on Facebook led to several deaths. The events are based in Sri Lanka, an island country in South Asia, so many of us will think, it could not happen to me, not in my country. Think again, for example, bullying and fake news have similar, traumatic effects, on some of our children. Facebook is a wonderful social media and I love it. Recent events have raised my awareness of fake news and my responsibility to check the veracity of a newsfeed before sharing it. Recently, I detected a probable fake news, I warned the sender who argued that even if it was fake news it supported my FB friend's ideas. We no longer are Facebook friends.

Facebook is a wonderful tool, provided “free” but traded for our privacy. This reminded me of this quote:

“Civilization is the progress towards a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the law of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”